


Prelude

by not_mom



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, I'm Love Kravitz Adventurezone, Kravitz being dead isn't new, Major character death - Freeform, More referenced than anything, Non-Graphic Sexual Content, Non-Graphic Violence, Pre-Canon, Pre-Canon Kravitz, Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-15 20:06:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17535371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/not_mom/pseuds/not_mom
Summary: Before you met Taako, you were a reaper. Before you were a reaper, well... you were a man.pre·lude | \ ˈprel-ˌyüd1: an introductory performance, action, or event preceding and preparing for the principal or a more important matter2: a musical section or movement introducing the theme or chief subject (as of a fugue or suite) or serving as an introduction to an opera or oratorio





	Prelude

Your name is Kravitz, and you’re born the second child to a cooper and his wife. You come into the world without too much fuss yourself (you’re an easy baby) but you make quite a stir. The midwife says that you’re born with a veil, something the priest claims is good luck. Good luck or not, your father still lights a candle every dawn until your first birthday to thank the Gods. You don’t understand any of this. You don’t understand what makes you so lucky or special; all you understand is a vague sense that you perhaps should have died from the pox when you were small instead of escaping with scars pitting your face and arms that fade as you grow. You recover from things your siblings don’t, at least. You may have been born second, the second of six, but you’re the oldest of three well before you reach adulthood. 

You think, sometimes, that you should feel worse for your dead siblings. You never got to know Tansy or Anatoily because they died when they were babies, but Leonard? He was the oldest, and he died when you were six, so you knew him. But you can only ever muster up a vague disappointment that he isn’t around- you never do come to understand why death is something to be _feared_.

You grow up surrounded by cats and chaos. Your father may be good at what he does, but making barrels is by no means a profession that makes men rich. Your house is small, a wooden frame filled in with wattle and daub to protect you from the worst of the elements, divided into three. It’s small and it’s cramped and you can’t go an hour without rubbing elbows with someone. But it’s home, and you don’t know any other life, so to you it’s perfect. 

Really, though, the size of the house doesn’t matter. You’re out most of the time anyways, as soon as you figure out walking. When you’re not helping your father in his workshop (your small hands are clumsy as you pass him tools and and try to learn how to bend wood), you’re tending to the cats (cats, as you’ve been told since you’ve been able to understand words, are good luck as they’re favored by the Gods and keep vermin out), or you’re out playing with the other children of the village. And as a small boy, it’s a good enough life. Your stomach isn’t empty, really, even if there are long stretches where all you eat is watery porridge and soup with wilted vegetables in it. You do get tired of your sisters sometimes. You get frustrated with their chatter about dolls and needlepoint and their tendency to try to get you to sit still long enough for them to twist your hair into locs and weave ribbons through it. The pale yellow ribbons get you teased by the other boys your age when you’re free to run around the village; they stand out against your dark hair even after a day of tumbling around with one another in the grass and mud. 

You retreat to the loft sometimes. You’re not supposed to. According to your mother, it’s for storage and too rickety and she tells you off for it time and time again, but it’s the only place you can really get a moment to yourself. You’re small enough that you can hide behind a basket and revel in being alone. Sometimes cats join you, nosing into your space until you just have to stroke them. Once, a queen carried her kittens over, tiny soft things whose eyes weren’t even open yet. She deposited them in your lap one by one by one until you were hunched protectively over five tiny mewling things that would dodder a few steps then slump down to nestle against you. You sat for what felt like hours, stroking them with gentle fingertips, until their mother returned to feed them when they started crying.

You’re apprenticed to your father, of course. You grow up learning the trade even though you lack both the passion and talent for it. Your interests lie in music, but learning to play flute doesn’t keep the workshop clean or get orders in on time or put food on the table, so you never get very good at it. Regardless, you hover by the band at festivals, drinking in the music, and go home to try to recreate the melodies or mimic the conductor. (You miss more than one girl trying to hint to you that she’d like to dance, too enraptured.) As you get a little older, your childhood becomes unremarkable, then vanishes altogether, consumed by work and family. 

At eighteen, you get married. Your mother arranges the whole thing, and you join your life with Eleonore’s on a warm night before Midsummer. She’s sixteen and beautiful, a quarter elf on her mother’s side, the daughter of the town tailor. In the tradition of the town, everyone came together to build your house, and you carry her across the threshold bursting with pride. (Now that you’re married, you participate in quite a few raisings yourself.) The two of you are by no means deeply in love, but you get along just fine. She’s kind and she’s happy to stay home: ideal traits in a wife. You should be over the moon, and you _are_ happy, you are, but... you also know, deep down, that if her mother wasn’t illegitimate the two of you never would have wed. Your family would never have been able to afford her dowry. 

Maybe that’s why you have trouble on your wedding night. That’s how you rationalize it at the time- you won’t understand the reality of being gay until much, much later. But that ends up not mattering too much, because in the end you give her a son. 

Gawen is the smallest person you’ve ever seen, and for the first week you hold him like he’s spun from glass. Eleonore teases you about it as she adjusts your grip, tells you that he’s a little sturdier than you give him credit for. Slowly, your paralysis around him fades. You get used to bouncing him and, even though it’s really a mother’s job, soon enough you start taking turns getting up in the middle of the night to shush him back to sleep. Eleonore appreciates it. She doesn’t do much beside pat you on the arm as you climb back into bed and snuggle against you, but you’re pretty sure that it’s appreciation. 

Married life suits you. You don’t want to brag, but the two of you are a good team. She’s got a way of gently teasing you that makes your heart feel full, and you don't think the two of you ever get into fights. Disagreements, sometimes. But you seem to have a way of working it out with each other before it comes to anything more serious. 

The only real sticking point is, to put it delicately, the bedroom. You never initiate things, never do more than give her a kiss goodnight unless she takes it upon herself to slip her hand down your pants or to pull you into a lingering kiss or straddle you and pull her dress off. You feel bad, of course, for not doing your duty as her husband; but you just aren't interested the... way she is. You try to please her anyways. You love her, she’s your partner in life and the mother of your son and the two of you are also friends, but you just can’t _love_ her. You try, but you can't look at her when the two of you are intimate, and that's about all you can say about that. 

Over the next two years, you see your sisters get married: first Anika, laughing with a farmer you know she's smitten with; then Marjan, straight-faced as the blacksmith pledges to care for and honor her for all time. Your father dies a week after Marjan's wedding. Between mourning and inheriting the family business proper at the ripe old age of twenty-one, you don't realize that Eleonore is trying to tell you that you're having a second child until she grabs both sides of your face and pulls you down to her level to say so. 

You call him Leo, after your brother. Gawen is enchanted with him, always underfoot trying to hold him or tell him about the world or wave a finger at him until Leo latches on with on chubby fist. Between Eleonore and Gawen and Leo and your work, your life is busy and your heart is full and things are so, so good. 

Your sisters start families of their own, and you see your nieces and nephews plenty. Anika’s twins are a force for chaos even as infants, and once they start walking you’re glad that they live out where they have all the space in the world to run around the fields. Marjan’s son looks like a miniature her and even as a baby something about the expressions he makes reminds you of his father. Family meetings are always raucous affairs that, more often than not, end with the children tiring themselves out and your mother exclaiming over how big everyone is getting.

Leo’s nearing three years old, Gawen five, when Amicia comes along. Eleonore is overjoyed to have a daughter, a tiny perfect thing who’s born with bright blue eyes. They darken with time, color changing to a dark brown that matches yours. Her brothers aren’t very interested in her, truth be told. They still think girls are gross, and seeing as she can’t play with them they don’t pay her too much mind. 

You understand now why your home was always a mess growing up. Eleonore is just one person, and the children are wholly unconcerned with keeping anything tidy, and you’re at the shop most of the day. At least it’s a comfortable mess? You can navigate without trouble. Some nights you only care about getting to your bed, and you always can, so that’s fine by you. 

It’s one of those nights, one where you got home late and fell asleep as soon as you were horizontal, that the peace is shattered. You wake up in the middle of the night, like usual, but this time it’s not because of a hungry baby. The screams you’re hearing aren’t Amicia demanding food. They come from outside. Eleonore makes a noise against you, something confused and sleepy, and you stop to plant a kiss to her temple before you scramble out of bed and stumble to the doorway. 

The scene before you is suspiciously peaceful. For the most part, the town appears asleep: it’s dark, lit only by a mostly-full moon, and the scream doesn’t repeat. You peer down the street, one way then the other, and chalk it up to a coyote before turning to go inside. 

“What is it?” Eleonore is in the doorway behind you, voice thick with sleep, and you nearly jump out of your skin. 

“Nothing, I think. Go back to bed.” Your heart rate is just starting to settle when there’s another scream. This one is louder, closer, and the two of you need only to exchange a look. Amicia starts up screaming too, probably woken by the noise, and you see your wife sigh. Eleonore starts back in then hesitates and passes you the iron stick you use to poke at the fire. You take off at a run, bare feet cold against the packed dirt, and wheel around the corner of a building to be met with a horror show. 

Aldrich Weathers is splayed out on the ground with a thick arrow buried in his chest. Its feathers are stiff, dark and shining in the scant light there is. A few steps past him is his wife Henrietta, her with two arrows in her back. The ground around her looks dark, stained with blood. Most striking, though, is the shambling monster standing over the Weathers’ twelve year old son. 

You flinch back as it brings a massive sword down with a sickeningly wet crunching noise. Once it’s kicked the child’s body free, it turns in what feels like slow motion and locks onto you. The cold seems to creep over you as it tilts its head to the side, baring teeth in a wicked mockery of a grin. The- the thing, whatever it is, looks like it used to be a human. It’s gaunt, skeletal, draped in rotting leather studded with metal, and unnatural light glows in its eye sockets. If you didn’t know better, you’d have said it was a corpse that climbed right back out of the grave.

You take a trembling step back and raise the poker as if it’s a shield. You feel wholly inadequate as it lurches forwards, steps heavy against the ground, but you hold your ground. Your muscles are tense, locked into position, and all you can do is pull the poker back then swing it as hard as you can when it gets close. 

You connect soundly with its chest and the thing _howls_. It sounds like rage incarnate, and now that you’re up close and personal, you can see that its flesh is starting to slough off- you catch a glimpse of teeth through where its cheek should have been and feel sick. It doesn’t swing its sword at you, though. Instead, it wraps a hand around your neck, moving with an unhurried confidence. This thing clearly has no doubt that it can crush you in an instant, and as you feet come off the ground you find that you’re quite inclined to agree.

You gasp as you _wither_ , as you feel like you age to dust in seconds, like you rot from the inside out. It feels like all of the light in the world has gone.

But you don’t die. You scream, vision dimming, and you don’t stop screaming. But you don’t die. You’re conscious of trying to say “go,” of trying to raise the alarm, but you don’t connect the words you’re saying with yourself as you raise the poker in numb hands and try to crack the thing’s skull open. 

You don’t. You miss, badly. But you hear someone shout from somewhere ahead, and the thing drops you to turn. Someone else is outside, and the being seems more interested in them than in you, dead man walking that you are. You’re crumpled in a heap, but you grit your teeth and gather your legs beneath you even as fear pounds through your veins. It takes everything in you to stand up, and you stumble like a newborn colt. Then you raise the poker again, connecting with its ribs, and nearly lose your grip as it bounces off. 

The monster turns back to you and raises its sword. Below the moon, as the town wakes up around you, you falter backwards and come away with a shallow gash down your chest. It just feels cold. It doesn’t even hurt, you’re so stunned, and you hear yourself grunt. Then you try to stab it with the poker. 

You’re dead before you get the chance. The thing impales you in a flash of motion and, even though you slump, it drives the sword deeper in, pushing until the hilt is flush with your chest. 

You’re dead before you hit the ground, before it plants a rotting boot on your shoulder and yanks the weapon free, before it finishes stabbing you. You don’t live to see the alarm you raised spread through the town. 

You, instead, wake up in a vast expanse of swirling dark clouds. It’s silent; so silent you can’t even hear your own blood pumping in your ears, and as your eyes adjust the mist before you coalesces into a dark figure. Vaguely humanoid. Imposing. Its edges are indistinct, bleeding into the shadow clinging to it. 

“RISE,” it says, the words clanging in your head like church bells. “FEW WOULD FIGHT A WIGHT ARMED ONLY WITH A POKER, KRAVITZ.” 

As you pick yourself up, you realize that the figure before you is a person in a hooded cloak, its face cast in such deep shadow that you honestly can’t be sure it even has a face. To ask how it knows your name or where you are doesn’t occur to you. Instinctively, you know that you’re dead. That you’re speaking to some sort of... representation of death itself. Instead, you press a hand to your chest, inspecting your fingers when it comes away clean.  
“Did my family survive?” They’re more important than your current bizarre situation- you have all the time in the universe to figure out what’s happening to you. You’re dead. But they might not be. 

“SOME YET LIVE.” 

It hits like someone’s punched you in the gut. Some? Did the... wight, she’d called it. Did the wight get to the children? To Eleonore? The idea of your son getting ripped apart or your wife being stabbed makes you feel sick, and as you waver and reach a hand out, the mist solidifies enough that you can grab it for support. It’s cold to the touch, glassy and hard in a way it has no right to be. 

“YOU CANNOT HELP THEM,” it intones, and its voice sounds like the groaning of chains. Sorrowful. “BUT I WOULD CHARGE YOU WITH PREVENTING FURTHER HORRORS.” 

You’re silent for a long, long time. Trying to turn the offer over, you decide that the idea of being able to prevent something like this from happening to another town could be a good thing. And according to the town’s priest, you’ve been marked by the Gods since birth. For this? Do you even have a choice? 

“Who are you?” You settle on asking in case this is a trick. You’d rather not have your soul taken by something unsavory. 

“I HAVE MANY NAMES, YOU KNOW ME SIMPLY AS DEATH. MY FAVORITE IS THE RAVEN QUEEN.” As it speaks, it somehow makes the sound of a rock being weathered into nothingness sound kind. You almost ask about this, fidgeting with the chunk of shadow still in your hand, but go silent as its cloak seems to fade; in the blink of an eye, the idea of a woman stands before you. 

“Did you choose me? Was I... always destined for this?” You settle on the more pressing question, trying to look like you’re brave instead of terribly afraid. 

“THERE IS ALWAYS A CHOICE.” You could swear she smiles. Her edges seem to soften. “I WOULD HAVE YOU TAKE UP THE MANTLE OF REAPER, BUT IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO REST, YOU HAVE MORE THAN EARNED IT.” With her piece said, Death- no, The Raven Queen- steps back and folds her hands to wait. They’re skeletal, as if carved out of ivory, but you somehow know that her nails are painted the color of stars being born. 

You have no breath, so the wind doesn’t get knocked out of you, but you still waver and fall and land hard on your butt as the enormity of what she’s offering washes over you. You’ve heard of Reapers only in snatches. They’re otherworldly guides, pieces of Death, that lead souls to rest. They also exact terrible precise justice against those that would pervert the natural order of things. Nothing is more sacred to them than the cycle of life and death, to the point that they’re incapable of feeling. Of pity. Of love. 

She wants to scorch the humanity out of you, and as you close your eyes and see the wight kill a child for no other reason than it being able to... you realize in a blinding instant that you want her to. That to sit idly by would be even less human of you. So when you look up at The Raven Queen, you shake but your resolve doesn’t. 

“I’ll- yes. I’ll do it.” 

Her smile spreads across her face like a sunrise, beautiful and bright. There’s more than a hint of tooth to it as well, some latent mean streak that’s glad to add a weapon to its arsenal, but you think you could come to understand it if there are worse horrors than wights out there. 

“RISE, THEN, AND JOIN MY FLOCK.” She offers you a hand. It’s warm when you take it, warm and soft and alive, and as The Raven Queen helps you up you feel a heavy cloak settle on your shoulders. It’s warm too, and it smells like home, and you catch a glimpse of yourself in the silver clasp as you look down at it. Unfamiliar golden eyes stare back at you, an unblemished version of your face (warped and distorted as it is in the reflection) gaping in disbelief. She laughs like baying hounds at your apparent surprise, then sweeps an arm around your shoulders. In an instant, the both of you are folded into and beneath and through the shadows then deposited in a grand throne room carved from marble and shadow. 

The Raven Queen gestures to the room, positively radiating how proud she is of the space. “WELCOME HOME.” 

You take a step forward, your dress shoes tapping softly against the floor, and turn in a slow circle. You feel like a different person, suddenly. This space- this infinite hall, fits you, because you instinctively understand it just as it understands you. You may not know exactly what you are yet, but you do know that your name is Kravitz. 

And _you_ are the grim fucking reaper.

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't completely canon-compliant, I don't think, but it's close enough. Many of the details of Kravitz's mortal life were based on Medieval and Renaissance Europe, but a lot of it was me going 'This is the D&D universe and it's this way because _I_ said so.'
> 
> To be born with a veil means to be born with the amniotic sac still intact- I believe this can also be called being born with a caul/in the caul or a mermaid birth! Superstition includes that a baby born with a veil is good luck and has supernatural powers, like being able to see ghosts or foretell the future. (Sounds like a good way to get marked by the Gods, huh?)
> 
> If you've never had kittens fall asleep on you, I highly recommend it.


End file.
